Auckland Triennial: If You Were To See Art Here

If You Were To Live Here
The 5th Auckland Triennial
Curated by Hou Hanru
Auckland Art Gallery, Gus Fisher Gallery, George Fraser gallery, St Paul St gallery, Fresh Gallery, Artspace and the Fill Archive, Silo Park
Until August 11

The biggest art contemporary art event Auckland has ever mounted opened last week at several city locations Nearly 50 artists from a dozen countries feature in the fifth triennial titled, which focuses on the way we think about, and adapt to, our living environments.

If You Were To Live Here is a catalogue of how we inhabit our living spaces and what we aspire to in our thinking about the physical, social, political and personal aspects of living in the built and natural environments.

In an introduction to the exhibitions, former Auckland Art Gallery director Chris Saines notes that “a city is not a collection of things in isolation, or a skyline. It is the spaces in between that shape our connections, interactions, relationships and therefore lives”.

One of the triennial's aims has been to create a place, to reinvent Auckland, and ultimately to make it into a locality. This attempt to inhabit a place and make it a space of living, inventing new forms of dwelling, is central to the idea of artistic creation and is also relevant at a time when discussion of Auckland unitary plan is taking place.

Deeply imprinted

In Auckland, as in most cities, the contemporary urban structures, both private and public spaces, have been deeply imprinted with overlapping layers of different historical periods of the city’s transformation. Modern and contemporary urbanisation has drastically changed the traditional typology of villages, cities and even nature. This process, like elsewhere in the world, reflects the almost accidental evolution of the form of the city.

Many of the artworks and installations focus on the way in which we are adapting to living in cities. It is a complex task, with governments attempting to provide more affordable housing, the rise of the small apartment and the equally impressive rise of the large high-tech house. Creating a range of living conditions and the provision of new affordable living ultimately means smaller living spaces for many people.

Michael Lin and Atelier Bow-Wow’s Model Home, 2012, project can be seen as an example of this direction. Realised in Shanghai, the most spectacularly expanding city in the world, the project has been conceived as a model home to house migrant workers from the countryside to work on the city’s construction sites.

The “houses”, which are less than two storeys high, have three levels which consist of a living platform not much larger than a single bed, which is the living space for a single man with a small amount of communal space.

It has been designed to provide humane, comfortable and affordable conditions for workers to live in. The project has been realised by the collective work of the artists, the architects, researchers and a museum team, along with participation by migrant workers.

Tall prison cells

While in the context of living in Shanghai may make this project appear to be an improvement over 10 men sleeping in a single room, the houses seem to be not much more than tall prison cells with a door to the outside world. They make for an interesting connection with shoe box apartments, which are so despised, and the different ways in which societies respond to social and economic demands.

Lin’s model houses are actually like small architectural models which have been blown up to full scale.

Existing on a full scale is the work of Australians Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro, who are presenting “dwell” – a mixture of kitset home, random building materials and a few pieces of furniture. They are piled up around the gallery as though building work is in progress.

But this is as far as it gets. It will look like the temporary quarters we see on television of displaced people, reinforcing the idea of a home not being the sum of its constituent parts but rather the human interactions which take place in it.

The notion of spaces and their impact on human relationships and interconnections is vividly shown in Amie Siegel's film Winter, which has been largely shot in Ian Athfield’s rambling house which hangs above Wellington’s harbour.

The loose dystopian narrative consists of layered voiceovers and dialogue with shifting relationships being reinforced by the engaging sounds and images. The film is a collection of cleverly designed vignettes which focus on individuals and objects.

Several of the objects used in the film have been made into another installation at the Auckland War Memorial Museum, where they have been places in display cabinets dotted around the museum. Even though they are labelied as being part of an exhibition, no information is given about what they are or their relevance. The only way to discern their purpose is to watch the film, which screens at the Auckland Art Gallery.

Peter Robinson also has a major work at the Auckland Museum but it has a low-level presence. He has constructed 200 two-metre long sticks covered in four colours: yellow, blue, green and red felt. These are mood or spirit sticks which staff have placed by objects or locations in the museum which refer to the mood of the person, the place or the object.

Like many of Robinson's previous works, the sticks are a form of language – like a binary code which can appear to be inaccessible but which the viewer ascribes meaning to.

Like Aboriginal song lines and dot painting, they provide a chart of discovery, creating a series of found objects or ready mades. They also act as a mysterious catalogue system, something that the writer Borges would have invented.

The viewer could hunt down all the red or blue locations to see if there are connections, but like Amie Siegel’s random objects they exist as surprises and small revelations on our journey through the museum.

Down on the waterfront at Silo Park there are a couple of major works.

With A [for 6 silos] Japanese artist Ryoji Ikeda has turned the six silos into a huge sound chamber by equipping them with simple speakers so that visitors becomes part of a minimalist, surreal sound experience. The work uses variations of the note A to create a subtle and intimate interior space.

Outside, along the multi-level walkway structure built during the renovation of the waterfront, Maori architects Rau Hoskins and Carin Wilson are leading a collective that will erect a paparewa teitei (food storage construction) to host a festival to celebrate hospitality and creativity at the location.

It will be the first reconstruction of a paparewa teitei in the Auckland region in more than 150 years. Reviving one of the most important forms of public ceremony, the project invites public participation and contribution.

Volunteers will be able to help pre-fabricate elements for the Paparewa structure, including cutting down and preparing the bamboo, telescoping it and construction onsite. There is also some preparation work involved in building the Korowai structure and people to help the event management team onsite during the events period. Business sponsorship in terms of finance, materials or services is also welcome.

The Auckland Art Gallery is the site of The Lab, which is intended as an opportunity for the public to engage in developing a local architectural culture. There are five projects which will expose the work of architecture, planning, design, music and dance students to each other and to the public.

The projects aim to demystify what it is that designers do and show the similarities and differences between the disciplines, and how they impact on public domain.

The projects are Muddy Urbanism, based on the Whau River, Ideal Home (land) focused on the nature of architecture, Te Paparewa Teitei o Tamaki project linked to the waterfront project, Transforming Topographies, which looks at they way that demographic shifts have shaped the way we live, and Disasters, Fires and Slow Moving Earthquakes.